On Apr 11, 2005 4:59 PM, Michael O'Keefe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Todd Walton wrote:
Protected from whom? Protected *by* whom?
From those who would benefit financially from all the hard work done (the whole point of a patent system) without some sort of remuneration (license fees)
Why do you think the patent system should exclude software?
Becoz software is just mathematics, and mathematics are explicitly excluded from being patentable.
So, do you worry about how mathematicians will be protected from others using their work without compensation?
I don't think mathematician should have any expectations of having their work "protected". After all, they have not created anything, only (re)discovered demonstrable rules of nature.
Your use of the word "protected" makes me think that you see it as a right, i.e. as an ideological issue.
Which of course it is. Although it is not an "inalienable" (god-given) right, but merely a political (legislated by landed gentry) right.
If that's the case, then it's government's role to make that happen.
Or to word it another way, it's government's role to enforce that right.
I guess the third way is that it *is* ideological, that a person *does* have the right to dictate the terms of use of software that they produce, but that the way the government currently does it is wrong/inefficient.
Software is merely an algorithmic (logical/mathematical) implementation of an idea or concept. Therefore, software (the implementation) should copyrightable, rather than it's processes patentable. Microsoft should be able to copyright Word, it should not be able to patent the algorithm for encoding a Word document in XML.
The way I tend to view it is that information cannot be "property". A person cannot squat on 1s and 0s like they can on dirt. That's what's wrong, but I'm not certain what's right.
Agreed.
So, if software shouldn't be patentable because it's like math, then why shouldn't software development be like math research in other ways?
-todd
No reason at all, and in fact things used to be like that. Read the ATT-USL v. UCB settlement. UCB essentially won because at the time Unix was initially developed, software was generally neither copyrighted nor patented, and ATT followed that trend by failing to copyright most of Unix. In fact they openly and aggressively encouraged everyone and their brother to copy, enhance, improve, and distribute Unix in the hopes that eventually the whole world would be one great market for ATT's own Unix-based products, as well as its support machine.
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Best Regards,
~DJA.-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
